Well, it seems that outsourcing to India is over. Now it's
outsourcing to Eastern Europe. 2/3 of the developers in my
company reside in a country in Eastern Europe. In my previous
country that ratio was even higher. The CTO wasted a lot of money
(because not talking to his people who would have told him) and
then had to look for ways to compensate for the losses.
I once followed a phone conversation between a C++ developer in
India and C++ developers in Germany. The developer in India
thought those in Germany were stupid and not getting it while the
developers in Germany tried to explain to him that they were not
stupid, but that he was missing some detail. Seems to me that
outsourcing development in a very difficult language such as C++
does not work. But as what "simpler" languages are concerned such
as Java or C# it is currently happening at full high.
The dream about systems programming is starting to fade away.
There are only very few jobs for it. And the dream about
application development is fading away, too. But illusions are
here to stay ;-).

Well, it seems that outsourcing to India is over. Now it's
outsourcing to Eastern Europe. 2/3 of the developers in my
company reside in a country in Eastern Europe. In my previous
country that ratio was even higher. The CTO wasted a lot of
money (because not talking to his people who would have told
him) and then had to look for ways to compensate for the losses.
I once followed a phone conversation between a C++ developer in
India and C++ developers in Germany. The developer in India
thought those in Germany were stupid and not getting it while
the developers in Germany tried to explain to him that they
were not stupid, but that he was missing some detail. Seems to
me that outsourcing development in a very difficult language
such as C++ does not work. But as what "simpler" languages are
concerned such as Java or C# it is currently happening at full
high.

I met many of them and they were all nice. But lots of Java
development work is going there and to other countries in Eastern
Europe. These guys are just as smart and it doesn't take a PhD in
rocket science for application development anyway...